Enjoy the new-year Top 10 lists, but don't forget to read the news too. 

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In the waning hours of every year, people take time to ponder upon the 8,736 hours that filled their previous 364 days of breathing. Then, they share all of that rushed wisdom in every publication, on every broadcast and on nearly every social media feed, with everything they favored or missed. You know, the vaunted Top 10 Whatevers.

We settle our scores with the past year by boasting about nabbing access to something, then spreading it all over the planet with in-your-face posts about best restaurants, concerts, books, performances, albums, movies and anything we tried or encountered during the past year—even new nature trails. Every year, we anxiously spend too much time out of the final days seeing if we measure up to those around us.

As often as those feeds enlighten or entertain us, they also fill us with guilt for missing out on something a total stranger raved about. Such times also give us time to score our own ranking on the scale of hip and cool as we adjust our own measuring points to match those of our greater audience of friends, family and followers. We need to know where we fit. Like wolves, humans are forever adjusting the social rankings in their own versions of wolfpack status. We just do it without taking down an elk—most of the time.

I don't pay much attention to those lists. Heck, if someone challenged me to name my Top 10 movies of the year I couldn't, basically due to me not going to 10 movies all year long. So, it does me no good at all to read a list of movies that are deemed best when I've not heard of any of them.

My own best movies for 2024, then, would be Dune and Wicked. They also make up the entirety of my worst movies.

Best meals? As a creature of habit, my list would be essentially the same Top 10 as my previous lists, perhaps allowing for one or two variables (hey, when you find a great plate of biscuits and gravy, why keep searching?)

Speaking of which, I will do a mild shoutout to three good plates of God's gift to the breakfast table: The biscuits and gravy served at Feldman's Deli, Vertical Diner and the Olympian Restaurant. You're welcome to differ—just don't feel bad about being wrong.

The only time I really paid attention to a year-end Top 10 ranking was long ago, in 1997 or so. That's the year we switched our name from Private Eye Weekly to Salt Lake City Weekly. We did a horrible job of letting people know the name change was coming, so badly in fact that it took about 20 years for the letters to end that said, "City Weekly is full of shit. I miss the Private Eye" despite it being the exact same newspaper, aside from the masthead.

It could have been worse, if not for the intervention of then-District Attorney Neal Gunnarson taking umbrage at a cover story of ours to the point of emptying some of our racks of newspapers and tossing them into dumpsters. Unfortunately, he was spotted by an intrepid reader who called us.

We then called the cops on the top cop himself. It made for a great story and an exciting time to be in the newspaper business.

The story simply wouldn't die. Longtime AM Radio host, broadcasting legend and good friend, Tom Barberi, brought it up every day for months on his morning radio program. Other local media ate it up too, because of course—you can't have law and order if the guy protecting the law and order is accused of theft and destruction of private property. Gunnarson was getting pummeled and now that I'm old and grey I can finally admit I felt sorry for him.

Not in the moment, though, because when it came time for him to end with a public apology, it was quite lame. But now, yeah. City Weekly dropped the charges and everyone went their own way. I heard he wasn't such a bad fellow, but that's how it goes.

At the end of that year, one of the local television stations (I believe ABC4) was broadcasting their Top 10 stories of the year. There we were at number 9 or so—Utah AG throws local newspaper into the dumpster! Newspaper presses charges!!

Now, that was damn good considering the big stories in front of us were plane crashes, tornadoes and exploding volcanos. It was a big deal. Such a big deal that, despite our dropping the ball on our name change from Private Eye to Salt Lake City Weekly, Gunnarson did us a huge favor by keeping our name out there in the mass media each day for about nine months running. Whatever money we didn't spend on marketing was made up for in buckets of free publicity worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If I were to ever compile a Top 10 of this newspapers' stories or events over these past four decades, the Gunnarson Steals Free Press fiasco would rank at or near the top. I can't even begin to think right now what would make up the other nine.

Most Top 10s are just about burger toppings. I think there's many of you out there that not only expect better, but who can do better as well. So, how about a challenge?

We'll call it the "Name the Top 10 positive attributes of Donald Trump before the world ends" contest. Send me your Top 10 lists and they may be printed here, plus you'll get a $25 gift certificate for a meal or cocktails. Happy New Year!

Send comments to john@cityweekly.net